After a nearly yearlong investigation by a UCSD professor of medicine, an original report was released on June 20 of last year that identified a cancer cluster in the Literature building, located in Earl Warren College. More recently, on Nov. 5, a town-hall meeting made the news a public concern, and Chancellor Marye Anne Fox quickly announced her intentions to put an investigative team of experts on the job.
Lackluster publicity moves aside, this blatantly dangerous situation is being treated like anything but the emergency it is. It seems that after the diagnoses of at least eight separate cases of breast cancer in individuals who worked primarily in the same building, and after identifying that the abnormally located elevator motor could very likely be emitting cancer-causing energy spikes ‘mdash; it seems that in this extreme of a case,’ administrators could possibly skip the formalities for once, set aside their pride and at least tell people what’s going on. The literature department did manage to move employees out of offices directly surrounding the motor and post a sign on elevators’ doors asking people to please not use them ‘mdash; but how would anyone know that wasn’t just some environmental push to suck it up and use the stairs?
Then there’s the fact that no one has actually done anything about the problem itself. Though each elevator would cost $350,000 to replace, who knows what the sum of all this dawdling around could really cost in the end, at $10,000 per evaluation and priceless lives on the line? There are cases in which slow-moving committee formations and bureaucratic steps by administrators to publicly display their concern and assemble teams for further investigation are essential to arriving at the best and most cost-efficient solution. But when a cancer-causing machine continues to hum behind all this hubbub, the answer seems clear ‘mdash; turn it off already.